Mobility and marginalization via the Nairobi expressway
Article summary, in lieu of Abstract
In this article I argue that the Nairobi expressway operates both as a material conduit for mobility and as a symbolic infrastructure that heightens longstanding urban marginalizations. Through a literary reading of three narrative forms: a photograph and tweet by Boniface Mwangi, a second tweet juxtaposing golfers with recently displaced families, and the satirical song “Maua ya Expressway”, the article demonstrates that Nairobi is a palimpsestic city whose meanings emerge from layered histories of colonial spatial ordering, classed mobility, and ecological loss. The expressway, often celebrated as a marker of modernity, becomes legible as an exclusionary structure that privileges the affluent “upper deck” while relegating ordinary residents to precarious and improvised forms of movement. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s theorization of the “solar Eye” and the “Icarian fall,” the article shows how elevated infrastructures obscure the lived textures of the city while narrative forms return us to the ground, where inequalities are most visible. Tweets and satire function as mediative acts that expose the contradictions of infrastructure-led development and articulate affective experiences of frustration, desire, and critique. Ultimately the article argues for a synthesized literary method that illuminates how urban space is made, contested, and felt.
Sam Dennis 